I joined the Yakezie challenge: Figuring out my Alexa Rank

What’s Yakezie? According to Yakezie.com, “The Yakezie is the web’s largest personal finance and lifestyle blog network.” To me, that translates into a clique I want to be a part of! They have 80 members (some of whom comment here, and every time that happens, I tend to feel like a very big deal so thanks you guys!)

So, I thought, this might be a good way for me to try to get a highly ranked blog.

I went to Yakezie, and then installed that little badge you see on the right side, and then I read the rules:

Install the Alexa toolbar, and tell everyone your Alexa rank. Here goes: I hate the Alexa toolbar, just to put that out there, there was nothing wrong with the regular Google search that was the default in Firefox — it frustrates me that it takes much longer to get Google images than it used to. Current Alexa rank: 2,075,007.

Write consistently (2-4 times a week) for six months. I am getting there. I have the consistency down, but I started frugalportland in November of 2011, and have been consistent since December 2011.

Install the Yakezie badge with pride. Installed! Proud!

Announce on your blog that you’ve joined the Yakezie challenge. I have joined!

Selflessly promote others. I’m a bit confused by this, but it does make sense now that other members often have lists of links. Those strike me as annoying, so I’ll have to figure out a way to do this in a way that works for me.

Those are the only rules. HOWEVER, the kicker is after the rules section. It says, “Your goal is to break 200,000 in Alexa after 6 months.” Did you see how I have 1.8 million to go?

Oh, jeez!

Here’s what I can tell about the Alexa rank system:

scoring goes like golf, so lower is better (too bad, because if the big numbers are the winners, I am so winning!)

I think it’s a little like Fight Club, except that the more money you give to the Alexa rank system, the higher your Alexa rank. I might be very wrong, but I don’t really want to pay $200 to find out!

Can I do this? Maybe not. But there’s no harm in trying, right?

For those of you who have done this, and succeeded, am I an idiot for even thinking it’s possible to increase my rank?

Do you have any advice? If I get enough advice I’ll post that separately. I’m not sure what to do!

Welcome to the Challenge! I love Portland! BTW, I've never seen a double action anti-spam system. Hope it works well for you. However, you might want to take one of them off to help promote more conversation.

Welcome to the challenge! You're starting pretty low – I think my initial jump was just because I was way out in the boondocks with my starting rank (7 million). Now that I'm down to 1.2 million, it seems much harder to move down.

I have a few comments about your blog – hope you don't mind! The first thing is that from your home page, I couldn't find a comment button on this post. I had to click on the URL of the post to first load it and then scroll down and see the comments. Second of all, as I've been typing this, it looks like the website I put as the URL is loading (it has a loading symbol). Not sure what it's trying to do but whatever it is, I'm not sure it's working. Last, I'm not sure what's up with the bottom of your post – it looks like you have related post links? But they're huge and the image overlaps with the title/bullet points and the ad you have there is rather large as well. Maybe this can be cleaned up a little?

Welcome to the challenge! It's a great way to develop and grow your blog.

When you say "list of links", you must mean a blogroll. I visit lots of blogrolls when I feel like reading a new blog – it's one way of promoting others, and I think it's a great way to do it. If you have a blogroll and add others to it, they are more likely to link back to you, bringing more traffic and readership to your site.

Also, promoting others can be through Twitter (If you find a post you like, Tweet about it and link to it), Facebook (posting a post on FB), Google+ (+1 the posts you find interesting), Reddit + Stumbleupon, even just referring and linking to other people's blogs in your posts :) I don't know if that helps at all.

Welcome. If you need anything let me know I would be happy to help. I have only been around since February. You will be surprised how quick your alexa drops once you start participating on other sites and comment comment comment.

I'm a bit late, but welcome to the Yakezie challenge. :-) Yakezie is awesome, so are all the members and challengers. It's amazing how quickly the Alexa drops, today you're at 734,439, so you'll be under 200k in no time. Good luck.